Week 2/ Chapter 2

• Research design matters, even the smartest people can be fooled.
• Prefrontonal lobotomy is a surgery that severs fibers connecting the frontal lobes of the brain from the underlying thalamus.
• Systematic research is important.
• Intuitive thinking is quick and reflexing, requires little thinking.
• Analytical thinking is slow and reflective, requiring effort.
• Heuristic is a mental shortcut or rule of thumb that helps us streamline our thinking and make sense of our world.
• Random selection is a procedure that ensures every person in a population has an equal chance of being selected to participate.
• Reliability is the consistency of measurement.
• Validity is the extent to which a measure assesses what it purports to measure.
• Replicability is the ability to duplicate process and get same results.
• External validity is the extent to which we can generalize findings to real world settings.
• Internal validity is the extent to which we can draw cause-and-effect inferences from a study.
• Existence proof is a demonstration that a given psychological phenomena can occur.
• Response set is the tendency of research participants to distort their responses to questionnaire items.
• Correlational design is a research design that examines the extent to which two variables are associated.
• Illusory correlation is a bias to seek to confirm events rather than to detect non-events.
• Random assignment is putting participants in specific groups randomly.
• Control group is a participant that does not receive manipulation.
• Experimental group is a participant that does receive manipulation.
• Operational definition is a working definition of what a researcher is measuring.
• Blind is unaware of who is in which group.
• Double-blind is when researcher and participant do not know whos in which group.
• Demand characteristics are cues that participants pick up from a study that allow them to generate guesses regarding the researchers hypothesis.
• Many scientists believe science is neutral, neither good nor bad.
• Informed consent is informing research participants of whats involved in a study before asking them to participate.
• Statistics is the application of mathematics to describe and analyze data.
• Descriptive statistics are numerical characterizations that describe data.
• Central tendency is a measure of the central score in a data set, where group clusters around it.
• Mean is the average.
• Median is the middle amount.
• Mode is the most frequent score in a data set.
• Variability is a measure of how loosely or tightly bunched scores are.
• Range is a measure of variability that takes difference of highest and lowest values.
• Standard deviation is a measure of variability that takes into account how far each data point is from the mean.
• Inferential statistics are mathematical methods that allow us to determine whether we can generalize findings from our sample to the full population.
• Meta-analysis is a statistical method that analyzes effects across studies to determine consistent patterns of results.
• The need for good research design is exemplified by the case of facilitated communication developed for autism.
• Heuristics are mental shortcuts or rules of thumb that help us streamline our thinking and make sense of our world.
• Systems of thinking include System 1, which is intuitive, fast, automatic, and System 2, which is slow, effortful.
• Non-random selection can skew results and make them inaccurate when applied to the population as a whole.